New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

This book presents a study of the acquisition of verbal and adjectivalagreementinflection in typically developing, monolingual Dutch children. The authorshows that Dutch children correctly inflect verbs for person and numberwith both existing and non-existing verbs from the age of three onward. Theresults of a preferential listening experiment reveal that perceptualsensitivity precedes production: Infants are able to discriminate betweencorrect and incorrect number agreement from the age of 18 months. Dutchchildren acquire adjectival inflection as early as verbal inflection, eventhough adjectival inflection is more complex, comprising gender, number anddefiniteness. Analyses of children's performance with adjectival inflectionpoint to substantial asymmetries between the development of grammaticalknowledge, on the one hand, and lexical knowledge, on the other. Whilechildren acquire grammatical rules early, it takes them much longer tolearn the relevant lexical properties of nouns (e.g. grammatical gender).It is argued that salience factors related to form, function, and frequencyplay a role in the development of inflectional morphemes. Methodologically,this study stresses the importance of meticulous testing and fine-grainedanalyses. The outcomes of the experiments are a welcome and valuablecomplement to existing spontaneous speech data. The book is of interest toscholars who work in the field of language acquisition, developmentalpsychology, as well as to linguists studying inflectional morphology.